Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who is known for conducting a systematic study of the acquisition of understanding in children. He is widely considered to be the most important figure in the 20th-century developmental psychology.
Born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Jean Piaget’s father, Arthur Piaget, taught medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. Piaget showed an early interest in biology and the natural world. He attended the University of Neuchâtel, and later, the University of Zürich.
Even as a young student, Piaget wrote two philosophical papers that were unfortunately rejected as adolescent thoughts.
It has been believed that no theoretical framework has had a bigger influence on developmental psychology than that of Jean Piaget. He founded the International Centre of Genetic Epistemology at Geneva and became its director. He made extraordinary contributions in various areas, including sociology, experimental psychology and scientific thought.
Piaget took ideas from biology, psychology and philosophy and investiagted the method by which children learn about the world. He based his conclusions about a child’s development on his observations and conversations with his own, as well as other children. By asking them ingenious and revealing questions about simple problems he had devised, he shaped a picture of their way of viewing the world by analyzing their mistaken responses. He forumalted a outstandingly well-articulated and integrated theory of cognitive development.
Piaget was a highly prolific author who wrote about 70 books and more than 100 articles about human psychology. His theoretical conceptualizations have induced a vast amount of research.
Jean Piaget was honoured with the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences in 1979. The following year, he died on September 16, 1980. He was 84 years old.
